He begins with a hypothetical in which you can swerve a car to kill one person instead of stay on its course and kill five. The audience chooses to swerve, and Edmond points out that we’re utilitarians. Second hypothesis: swerve into a barrier that will kill you but save the pedestrians. Most of us say we’d like it to swerve. Edmond points out that this is a variation of the trolley problem, except now it’s a machine that’s making the decision for us.

Autonomous cars are predicted to minimize fatalities from accidents by 90%. He says his advisor’s research found that most people think a car should swerve and sacrifice the passenger, but they don’t want to buy such a car. They want everyone else to.

He connects this to the Tragedy of the Commons in which if everyone acts to maximize their good, the commons fails. In such cases, governments sometimes issue regulations. Research shows that people don’t want the government to regulate the behavior of autonomous cars, although the US Dept of Transportation is requiring manufacturers to address this question.

Edmond’s group has created the moral machine, a website that creates moral dilemmas for autonomous cars. There have been about two million users and 14 million responses.

Some national trends are emerging. E.g., Eastern countries tend to prefer to save passengers more than Western countries do. Now the MIT group is looking for correlations with other factors, e.g., religiousness, economics, etc. Also, what are the factors most crucial in making decisions?

They are also looking at the effect of automation levels on the assignment of blame. Toyota’s “Guardian Angel” model results in humans being judged less harshly: that mode has a human driver but lets the car override human decisions.

Q&A

In response to a question, Edmond says that Mercedes has said that its cars will always save the passenger. He raises the possibility of the owner of such a car being held responsible for plowing into a bus full of children.

Q: The solutions in the Moral Machine seem contrived. The cars should just drive slower.

A: Yes, the point is to stimulate discussion. E.g., it doesn’t raise the possibility of swerving to avoid hitting someone who is in some way considered to be more worthy of life. [I’m rephrasing his response badly. My fault!]

Q: Have you analyzed chains of events? Does the responsibility decay the further you are from the event?